LGBT reviews and ramblings since 2006

Entries tagged with queers in history

Louis Aragon (October 3, 1897 – December 24, 1982) was one of the leading lights in the Dadaist and surrealist movements. His La Grande Gaite, Le Paysan de Paris, and "Traite du Style" are classics of surrealist literature and poetry.

Following a visit to Russia in 1931, Aragon abandoned surrealism and became a Communist, after which his writing took a realistic tack. During the German occupation of France during World War II, Aragon became famous as the Poet of the Resistance.

After the death of his wife in 1970, Aragon lived with poet Michel Lariviere, who became his lover and companion. Affirming his bisexuality toward the end of his life, Aragon rode in a pink convertible in more than one gay pride parade.

John Osborne was the primogenitor and main proponent of the movement of "angry young men" in the British theatre of the 1950s. His plays—including Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, Inadmissible Evidence, Epitaph for George Dillon, and Time Present—are peppered with vitriolic bursts of invective and degradation.

The targets of Osborne’s attacks were often homosexuals and hypocrites. It seems that Osborne was both, and his anger may have been directed primarily at himself. Following Osborne’s death in December 1994, actor-playwright Anthony Creighton (1922-2005) revealed that he and Osborne had had a long-running affair, documented by voluminous correspondence between them. Creighton was the model for Cliff in Look Back in Anger, which Osborne had written when he and Creighton were living on a houseboat on the Thames in 1954.

Osborne’s 1965 play A Patriot for Me is based on the homosexual scandal of Colonel Alfred REDL. Britain’s censors refused to allow the play, with its depiction of a drag ball, to be staged. Critic Mary McCarthy wrote of the play that its "chief merit is to provide work for a number of homosexual actors, or normal actors who can pass as homosexual."

After a serious liver crisis in 1987, Osborne became a diabetic, injecting twice a day. He died in 1994 from complications from his diabetes at the age of 65 at his home in Clunton, near Craven Arms, Shropshire. He is buried in St George's churchyard, Clun, Shropshire, alongside his last wife, the critic Helen Dawson, who died in 2004.

Edmund Goulding directed Greta GARBO in Grand Hotel (Academy Award for Best Picture, 1932), Tyrone Power and Clifton WEBB in The Razor’s Edge, and Ronald Reagan in Dar Victory. Hollywood legend has it that Power and Errol Flynn used his home as a romantic rendezvous. Goulding also directed a series of vehicles for Bette Davis, including The Old Maid and The Great Lie. He often wrote the scripts for his films and sometimes composed the music as well.

Goulding was openly bisexual and renowned for his hedonistic parties.

Edmund Goulding (20 March 1891 – 24 December 1959) was a British film writer and director. As an actor early in his career he was one of the 'Ghosts' in the 1922 British made Paramount silent Three Live Ghosts alongside Norman Kerry and Cyril Chadwick. Also in the early 20s he wrote several screenplays for star Mae Murray and directed by her then husband Robert Z. Leonard. Goulding is best remembered for directing cultured dramas such as Love (1927), Grand Hotel (1932) with Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford, Dark Victory (1939) with Bette Davis, and The Razor's Edge (1946) with Gene Tierney and Tyrone Power. He also directed the classic film noir Nightmare Alley (1947) with Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell, and the action drama The Dawn Patrol. He was also a successful songwriter, composer, and producer.

Before moving to films, Goulding was an actor, playwright and director on the London stage.

A longtime resident of London, Philadelphia-born playwright Martin Sherman made his move to the big screen in the late 1990s with his original script Alive and Kicking/Indian Summer and the adaptation of his stage success Bent. Sherman has been published in two volumes of the collection Gay Plays, and many of his works focus on homosexuality.

Sherman is an openly gay Jew, and many of his works dramatize "outsiders," dealing with the discrimination and marginalisation of minorities whether "gay, female, foreign, disabled, different in religion, class or color."

Bent was first performed in a workshop at the O’Neill Theatre Centre in Waterford, Connecticut, in 1978, before premiering in London (with Ian MCKELLEN and Tom Bell in the lead roles) and on Broadway (with Richard Gere, who won the Tony Award, and David Dukes) in 1979. The play was the first to deal with the internment of homosexuals by the Nazis during World War II. Set primarily in a concentration camp, it garnered controversy for a scene in which the gay inmates, unable to touch each other, achieve climax through words.

The 1997 film version, directed by Sean MATHIAS, starred Clive Owen, Lothaire Bluteau, McKellen, and Mick JAGGER, and featured early performances by Rachel Weisz, Jude Law, and Paul Bettany.

Sherman has had a number of stage successes in London (where he permanently settled in 1980). A Madhouse in Goa focused on the deceptive relationship between a young man and the woman he encounters on a Greek island. Vanessa Redgave played Isadora DUNCAN in Sherman’s When She Danced, and Rupert EVERETT won praise for his turn as the object of the affection of a British Army officer in North Africa in Some Sunny Day.

Sherman wrote the book for the Broadway smash Boy from Oz, starring Hugh Jackman and based on the life of Peter ALLEN.

From 1904 until she retired in 1935, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey toured the nightclubs and juke joints in the southern and midwestern states, belting out a newfangled meld of black spirituals and folk music known as "the blues." There was one brief interruption during those three decades: in 1925 Rainey was arrested at a Chicago party where the women—to the feigned shock of the Chi-town cops—were completely nude. The next morning Rainey’s friend Bessie SMITH bailed her out, and the history of music barely missed a beat.

Rainey’s "Prove It on Me Blues" includes the notorious (and surely autobiographical) lines: "Went out last night with a crowd of my friends. They must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t likeno men."

Ma Rainey (April 26, 1886 – December 22, 1939) was one of the earliest known American professional blues singers and one of the first generation of such singers to record. She was billed as The Mother of the Blues.

She began performing at the age of 12 or 14, and recorded under the name Ma Rainey after she and Will Rainey were married in 1904. They toured with F.S. Wolcott’s Rabbit Foot Minstrels and later formed their own group called Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues. From the time of her first recording in 1923 to five years later, Ma Rainey made over 100 recordings. Some of them include, Bo-weevil Blues (1923), Moonshine Blues (1923), See See Rider (1924), Black Bottom (1927), and Soon This Morning (1927).

Ma Rainey was known for her very powerful vocal abilities, energetic disposition, majestic phrasing, and a ‘moaning’ style of singing similar to folk tradition. Though her powerful voice and disposition are not captured on her recordings (due to her recording exclusively for Paramount, which was known for worse-than-normal recording techniques and among the industry's poorest shellac quality), the other characteristics are present, and most evident on her early recordings, Bo-weevil Blues and Moonshine Blues. Ma Rainey also recorded with Louis Armstrong in addition to touring and recording with the Georgia Jazz Band. Ma Rainey continued to tour until 1935 when she retired to her hometown, Columbus, Georgia, where she ran two theaters, "The Lyric" and "The Airdrome", until her death from a heart attack in 1939 in Rome, Georgia.

In 1983, Rainey was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

The music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk presaged the ragtime of Scott Joplin and other African American musicians. "The Great Galloping Gottschalk" was a superlative showman, traveling the world with his flamboyant musical spectaculars. One of his works, Night in the Tropics, was designed to be performed by eighty pianists on forty pianos.

Gottschalk’s primary relationships, both sexually and emotionally, were with men, and a 1994 biography establishes him as homosexual.

Gottschalk’s work is notable for his interest in minority cultures and his rebellion against the musical authorities of his day. His urge to travel, which broadened his scope—some credit him with creating the first "world music"—was no doubt related to his desire to escape the moral confines of puritan America.

During one of his concerts, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on November 24, 1869, he collapsed from having contracted malaria. Just before his collapse, he had finished playing his romantic piece Morte! (interpreted as "she is dead"), although the actual collapse occurred just as he started to play his celebrated piece Tremolo. Gottschalk never recovered from the collapse.

Three weeks later, on December 18, 1869, at the age of 40, he died at his hotel in Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro, probably from an overdose of quinine. (According to an essay by Jeremy Nicholas for the booklet accompanying the recording "Gottschalk Piano Music," performed by Philip Martin on the Hyperion label, "He died ... of empyema, the result of a ruptured abscess in the abdomen.")

Sylvester James (Los Angeles, September 6, 1947 – San Francisco, December 16, 1988), better known as Sylvester, was an American disco and soul singer-songwriter. Known for his flamboyant and androgynous appearance, he was often described as a drag queen, although repeatedly rejected such a description. Responsible for a string of hit singles, in the late 1970s, Sylvester became known in the United States under the moniker of the "Queen of Disco".

Born in Watts, Los Angeles, Sylvester first developed a love of singing through the gospel choirs of his Pentecostal church, however left the congregation after being persecuted for his homosexuality. Leaving home as a teenager, he was an early founder of a group of African-American cross-dressers and transwomen known as The Disquotays, who eventually disbanded in 1970. Moving to San Francisco, he embraced the counter-cultural lifestyle and joined drag troupe The Cockettes, eventually producing his own solo shows in which he was heavily influenced by female blues and jazz singers like Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker. It the middle of their critically panned tour of New York City, Sylvester left the Cockettes and decided to focus entirely on a solo career.

As the front man for Sylvester and his Hot Band, he released two commercially unsuccessful albums on Blue Thumb Records in 1973 before the members of the Hot Band left him. Gaining new backing singers in the form of Two Tons O' Fun and subsequently Jeanie Tracy, he proceeded to obtain a new recording contract with Harvey Fuqua of Fantasy Records. His first solo album, Sylvester (1977), was a moderate success, and was followed by the acclaimed disco album, Step II (1978), which spawned the hit singles "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" and "Dance (Disco Heat)". He produced three more albums with Fantasy Records before breaking from them un-amicably. Signing to Megatone Records, the dance-orientated label founded by his friend and collaborator Patrick Cowley, he produced four further albums and the hit Hi-NRG track "Do Ya Wanna Funk". An activist who campaigned against the spread of HIV/AIDS, Sylvester died from complications arising from the virus in 1988.

Charles Willard Moore (October 31, 1925 – December 16, 1993) was an American architect, educator, writer, Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and winner of the AIA Gold Medal in 1991.

Moore graduated from the University of Michigan in 1947 and earned both a Master's and a Ph.D at Princeton University in 1957, where he remained for an additional year as a post-doctoral fellow. During this fellowship, Moore served as a teaching assistant for Louis Kahn, the Philadelphia architect who taught a design studio. It was also at Princeton that Moore developed relationships with Hey fellow students Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull, Jr., Richard Peters, and Hugh Hardy, who would remain lifelong friends and collaborators. During the Princeton years, Moore designed and built a house for his mother in Pebble Beach, California, and worked during the summers for architect Wallave Holm of neighboring Monterey. Moore's Master's Thesis explored ways to preserve and integrate Monterey's historic adobe dwellings into the fabric of the city. His Doctoral dissertation, "Water and Architecture", was a survey of the presence of water in shaping the experience of place; many decades later, the dissertation became the basis of a book with the same title.

In 1959, Moore left New Jersey and began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. Moore went on to become Dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1965 through 1970, directly after the tenure of Paul Rudolph. In 1975, he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles where he continued teaching (one of his students included Lem Chin). Finally, in 1985, he became the O'Neil Ford Centennial Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

The exuberant, postmodern archetype Piazza d'Italia (1978), an urban public plaza in New Orleans, Louisiana

Sitting Bull, or Ta-Tanka I-Yotank, was the great Sioux leader and warrior who helped defeat General George Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.

One of Sitting Bull’s five wives was a "two-spirit“ man. Virtually all American Indian tribes had a tradition of "two-spirits,“ homosexual males assuming the roles of women, and women assuming the roles of men, in work, sex, and social functions. Indians revered the two-spirit, typically an effeminate man or masculine woman who did not fit into standard gender roles. Two-spirits were treated as sacred and held ceremonial roles as psychic healers, medicine men, prophets, and shamans.

European settlers repressed the tradition and it went underground, reemerging after the rebirth of Indian culture and the rise of gay liberation in the 1970s.

Serge Lifar was a star of the Ballets Russes and the Paris Opera Ballet, and one of the greatest male ballet dancers of the twentieth century.

Lifar first attracted the attention of impresario Serge DIAGHILEV, who seduced him and then gave him a role in the Ballets Russes. Alter Diaghilev’s death in August 1929, with the Ballets Russes in disarray, Lifar joined the Paris Opera Ballet, with plans to star in a production to be choreographed by Balanchine. Balanchine fell ill and had to withdraw from the project. Stepping in, Lifar established himself as choreographer and star dancer at the premiere of Promethee. He was soon engaged as the ballet master and director at the Paris Opera Ballet, where he remained in charge, barring one significant interruption, until 1957.

In Paris during World War II, Lifar openly socialized with the German High Command, and after the war he was banished permanently from the Paris Opera Ballet. He claimed, implausibly, thatthis collaboration was a cover for his work in the resistance, and he was reinstated in 1947.

Versatile character actor Charles Laughton, who appeared in such films as Witness for the Prosecution, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, was married for thirty-three years to actress Elsa Lanchester. She stuck by the thespian’s side despite his 1931 revelation to her that he was gay. Her original reaction, however, was not reassuring: She went deaf for over a week after he told her!

Charles Laughton (1 July 1899 – 15 December 1962) was a British American stage and film actor and director.

Laughton was trained in London at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and first appeared professionally on the stage in 1926. He played a wide range of classical and modern parts, making a big impact in Shakespeare at the Old Vic. His film career took him to Hollywood, but he also collaborated with Alexander Korda on some of the most notable British films of the era, including The Private Life of Henry VIII.

Among Laughton's biggest film-hits were The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Mutiny on the Bounty, Ruggles of Red Gap, Jamaica Inn, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Big Clock. In his later career, he took up stage directing, notably in the Caine Mutiny Court Martial, and George Bernard Shaw's Don Juan in Hell, in which he also starred. In 1927, he was cast in a play with his future wife Elsa Lanchester, with whom he lived and worked until his death.

In 1927, Laughton began a relationship with Elsa Lanchester, at the time a cast mate in a stage play. The two were married in 1929, became American citizens in 1950, and remained together until Laughton's death. Over the years, they appeared together in several films, including Rembrandt (1936), Tales of Manhattan (1942) and The Big Clock (1948). Lanchester portrayed Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII's fourth wife, opposite Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII. They both received Academy Award nominations for their performances in Witness for the Prosecution (1957) — Laughton for Best Actor, and Lanchester for Best Supporting Actress—but neither won. Laughton and Lanchester had no children.

Donatello was the finest sculptor of the fifteenth century. He revived and refined the art of classical sculpture in the round, and many of his works are explicitly homoerotic. His David is lissome and his St. George became emblematic of beauty for admirers of the male form.

Donatello was notorious for his love of boys. A surviving story has him chasing, with murderous intent, a young thief, whose beauty winds up charming the artist into forgiveness on sight.

Florentine scholar POLIZIANO, in his book Detti piacevoli, recorded several jokes concerning Donatello’s relationships with young male servants. He noted that the sculptor hired particularly attractive boys, and “stained” them so that no one else would want them; another anecdote was about an assistant who left Donatello after a fight, and how they made up by “laughing” at each other—contemporary slang for having sex.

Handsome hunk Van Johnson was one of the biggest stars in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, appearing in dozens of major films.

Johnson married former stage actress Eve Abbott (1914–2004) on January 25, 1947, the day after her divorce from actor Keenan Wynn was finalized. In 1948, the newlyweds had a daughter, Schuyler. By this marriage, Johnson had two stepsons, Edmond Keenan (Ned) and Tracy Keenan Wynn. The Johnsons separated in 1961 and their divorce was finalized in 1968. According to a statement by Eve Abbott Johnson, their marriage had been engineered by MGM: "They needed their 'big star' to be married to quell rumours about his sexual preferences and unfortunately, I was 'It'—the only woman he would marry." When Johnson’s marriage ended in a highly publicized divorce, it wasn’t because he left her for a younger woman. He left her for a younger man! (Evie always surrounded herself with gay men and was also very close to Tyrone Power.)

Johnson helped raise Evie’s two children from her marriage to Keenan Wynn. In fact, it was Johnson’s stepson Ned Wynn who outed him when Ned’s 1990 memoir “We Will Always Live in Beverly Hills” recounted the salacious details of his mother’s divorce from Johnson.

Johnson lived in a penthouse in the Sutton Place area of East 54th Street on Manhattan's East Side with his cat Fred until 2002, when he moved to Tappan Zee Manor, an assisted living facility in Nyack, New York. After having been ill and receiving hospice care for the previous year, he died there on December 12, 2008. Wendy Bleisweiss, a close friend, indicated that he died of natural causes. His body was cremated. He died at age ninety-two.

Thomas Lee "Tommy" Kirk (born December 10, 1941) is a former American actor, and later a businessman.

Old Yeller, The Shaggy Dog, Swiss Family Robinson, The Absent-Minded Professor—Tommy Kirk was the wholesome, all-American kid in many of the Disney films of the late 1950s and early ’60s. When he got older he graduated to the lead in a number of “beach party” features, the genre of teen films set on California’s coast.

As Kirk said in an interview, “Even more than MGM, Disney [in the early 1960s] was the most conservative studio in town. They were growing aware. They weren’t stupid. They could add two and two, and I think they were beginning to suspect my homosexuality. I noticed people in certain quarters were getting less and less friendly. In 1963 Disney didn’t renew my option and let me go. But Walt let me return to do the final Merlin Jones movie, The Monkey’s Uncle, because those were moneymakers for the studio. In the 1960s all my social life was underground gay. It was my own life. I kept it separate from work, where I went on publicity dates with Annette Funicello or Roberta Shore.”

Kirk was fired from the John Wayne picture The Sons of Katie Elder after being arrested on Christmas Eve 1964 for possession of drugs. Although the charges were later dropped Kirk would go on to develop a drug addiction.

Kirk's acting career tapered off during the 1960s, hampered by the transition to adulthood, drug use, and "personal problems." Eventually he left show business, gave up drugs, and succeeded in starting his own carpet-cleaning business in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles.

Henry Dixon Cowell was an innovative proponent of Modernist theory in music and one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century. He taught at the New School for Social Research (1928-1963) and developed techniques of “tone clusters,” where the fist or palm is used to hit several keys at once, and percussing directly on piano strings. He wrote some of the first “aleatory” works, where an element of chance enters into each performance.

Cowell’s musical compositions include Tides of Manaunaun, The Lilt of Reel, Synchrony, Persian Set, Ongaku, and Concerto for Koto and Orchestra. Among his students were George Gershwin, John CAGE, and, later, Burt Bacharach.

Cowell, who was bisexual, was arrested and convicted on a morals charge in 1936. Sentenced to fifteen years, he spent four in San Quentin State Prison. There he taught fellow inmates, directed the prison band, and continued to write music, producing around sixty compositions, including two major pieces for percussion ensemble: Pulse and Return.

Cowell had contributed to the Eiffel Tower project at the behest of Cage, who was not alone in lending support to his friend and former teacher. Cowell's cause had been taken up by composers and musicians around the country, although a few, including Ives, broke contact with him. Cowell was eventually paroled in 1940; he relocated to the East Coast and the following year married Sidney Hawkins Robertson (1903–1995, married name Sidney Robertson Cowell), a prominent folk-music scholar who had been instrumental in winning his freedom. Cowell was granted a pardon in 1942.

Following his release, Cowell toned down his approach, and became notably more conservative in politics and music.

Plan 9 From Outer Space is a film that’s so bad it’s good, and its quirky style is the result of the determined creativity of director Ed Wood. Even the death of its star, Bela Lugosi, did not prevent Wood from completing the picture—using his wife’s chiropractor as a stand-in for Lugosi’s remaining scenes.

Wood was a cross-dresser, notorious for wearing his girlfriends’ angora sweaters while on the job. He claimed that as a Marine in World War II, he had participated in the Battle of Guadalcanal while secretly wearing a brassiere and panties beneath his uniform. His 1953 film Glen or Glenda was based on the life of transsexual Christine Jorgensen.

Wood was depicted as basically a hetero transvestite in the brilliant eponymous motion picture, which was directed by Tim Burton and starred Johnny Depp as Wood. Wood’s actual sexual orientation was considerably more ambiguous, with at least one biographer who knew him (Jean Marie Stine) claiming he had “homosexual tendencies.”

Margaret Cho is Korean American, she’s queer, she’s funny, and she’s on TV—get used to it. Her birth name was Moran Cho, and all the kids at school called her “moron.” Naturally she developed a sense of humor and renamed herself Margaret as soon as possible.

Cho was a successful stand-up comic when ABC asked her to star in a series about a Korean American family, All American Girl. It was a devastating experience for her, as network executives criticized her appearance and injected gay and Asian sterotypes into the show’s content. Having become convinced that she was too fat, Cho literally starved herself, almost to death. The show didn’t make it into a second season.

Following the cancellation of All American Girl, Cho dealt with addiction to alcohol and other demons. She came back with I’m the One I Want, her one-woman show, book, and CD. In 2008 she returned to television in the reality show Cho Show on VH1.

Self-described as “queer,” Cho has dated film director Quentin Tarantino, musician Chris Isaak, and other men. In 2003 she married artist Al Ridenour. She’s more private about her girlfriends, but often uses her lesbian experiences as part of her act. She’s been a very active supporter of gay rights, and was deputized to perform marriages in San Francisco before same-sex marriage was outlawed by Proposition 8.

Alvin Ailey (January 5, 1931 - December 1, 1989) was an African-American choreographer and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City. Ailey is credited with popularizing modern dance and revolutionizing African-American participation in 20th century concert dance. His company gained the nickname "Cultural Ambassador to the World" because of its extensive international touring. Ailey's choreographic masterpiece Revelations is believed to be the best known and most often seen modern dance performance. In 1977, Ailey was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1988, just one year before his death. (P: photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1955)

Ailey was born to his 17-year-old mother, Lula Elizabeth Ailey, in Rogers, Texas. His father, also named Alvin, abandoned the family when Alvin was only six months old. Like many African Americans living in Texas during the Great Depression, Ailey and his mother moved often and she had a hard time finding work. Ailey grew up during a time of racial segregation, violence and lynchings against African-Americans. When Ailey was five, his 22-year-old mother was raped by a group of white men, leaving him afraid of whites. Early experiences in the Southern Baptist church and juke joints instilled in him a fierce sense of black pride that would later figure prominently in Ailey's signature works.

In the fall of 1942, Ailey's mother, in common with many African Americans, migrated to Los Angeles, California, where she had heard there was lucrative work supporting the war effort. Ailey, aged 11, joined his mother later by train, having stayed behind in Texas to finish out the school year. Ailey's first junior high school in California was located in a primarily white school district. As one of the few black students, Ailey felt out of place because of his fear of whites, so the Aileys moved to a predominantly black school district. He matriculated at George Washington Carver Junior High School, and later attended the Thomas Jefferson High School. He sang spirituals in the glee club, wrote poetry, and demonstrated a talent for languages. He regularly attended shows at Lincoln Theater and the Orpheum Theater. Ailey did not become serious about dance until in 1949 his school friend Carmen De Lavallade introduced him to the Hollywood studio of Lester Horton. Horton would prove to be Ailey's major influence, becoming a mentor and giving him both a technique and a foundation with which to grow artistically.

A major figure on the British literary scene during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, critic Cyril Connolly was, with Peter WATSON, one of the founders and editors of Horizon, an influential literary magazine. His reviews in the Observer and the Sunday Times attracted a wide audience.

Connolly was married three times, but at the time of his first marriage he wrote to a former schoolmate, “Of course, the problem is that I am still homosexual, emotionally.”

Gale Temple, in an article about Henry JAMES, describes Connolly, like James, as being in a state of permanent adolescence, “a melancholic yearning for his days at Eton when sexually undifferentiated forms of intragender camaraderie and togetherness imbued life with seemingly infinite promise.”

Frank Kermode, writing in the New Republic, described Connolly thus: “Although plump and far from handsome, he seems to have had a powerful attraction for women, or anyway for those who responded to his appeals for pity and agreed with his opinion that a chronic shortage of cash and the consequent need to work at something—writing reviews, for instance—was preventing him from producing a work of genius, which was the only kind of work, he believed, worth bothering about.”

Laurence Harvey (1 October 1928 – 25 November 1973) was a Lithuanian-born actor who achieved fame in British and American films, being best known for his lead performance in Room at the Top (1959).

He stood with John Wayne in The Alamo. He wooed Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8. And he took a Walk on the Wild Side in 1962. He was Laurence Harvey, one of Hollywood’s most versatile leading men.

British actor John FRASER wrote in his memoir Close Up that Harvey was gay, and that his lover was his manager James Woolf. “As a teenager, he started out living with Hermione Baddeley, a blowsy star of intimate revue more than twice his age. Then he married Margaret Leighton, old enough to be his mother, but a woman of style. When this marriage was over, he married Joan Cohn, widow of Harry Cohn, managing director of Columbia Studios. Throughout all these career marriages, he still managed to string Jimmy Woolf along.” Eventually he married Paulene Stone. Harvey met Stone on the set of A Dandy in Aspic, and while still married to Cohn he became a father for the first time when Stone gave birth to a daughter, Domino, in 1969. Harvey divorced Cohn (who was 17 years his senior) and married Stone in 1972.

As frontman for the British rock group Queen, Freddie Mercury (September 5, 1946 – November 24, 1991) often appeared onstage sporting leather shorts and a matching cap. Although he valued his privacy, in a March 12, 1974, interview for New Musical Express he confessed, “I am as gay as a daffodil, my dear!” When asked whom he’d like to have been in another life, Freddie Mercury replied “Marie Antoinette . . . she had all those jewels.”

Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara, 5 September 1946 – 24 November 1991) was a British musician, singer and songwriter, best known as the lead vocalist and lyricist of the rock band Queen. As a performer, he was known for his flamboyant stage persona and powerful vocals over a four-octave range. As a songwriter, Mercury composed many hits for Queen, including "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Killer Queen", "Somebody to Love", "Don't Stop Me Now", "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and "We Are the Champions". In addition to his work with Queen, he led a solo career, and also occasionally served as a producer and guest musician (piano or vocals) for other artists. He died of bronchopneumonia brought on by AIDS on 24 November 1991, only one day after publicly acknowledging he had the disease.

Mercury was a Parsi born in Zanzibar and grew up there and in India until his mid-teens. He has been referred to as "Britain's first Asian rock star". In 2002, Mercury was placed at number 58 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons, in 2006, Time Asia named him one of the most influential Asian heroes of the past 60 years, and he continues to be voted one of the greatest singers in the history of popular music. In 2005, a poll organised by Blender and MTV2 saw Mercury voted the greatest male singer of all time. In 2008, Rolling Stone editors ranked him number 18 on their list of the 100 greatest singers of all time. In 2009, a Classic Rock poll saw him voted the greatest rock singer of all time. Allmusic has characterised Mercury as "one of rock's greatest all-time entertainers", who possessed "one of the greatest voices in all of music".

In 1985 Freddie Mercury began a relationship with hairdresser Jim Hutton. Hutton, who was tested HIV-positive in 1990, lived with Mercury for the last 6 years of his life, nursed him during his illness, and was present at his bedside when he died. Hutton claimed that Mercury died wearing a wedding band that Hutton had given him. In his will, Mercury left his London home to his former lover and only true friend Mary Austin saying, "You would have been my wife and it would have been yours anyway".

Walter Jenkins was a top advisor and chief of staff to President Lyndon Johnson until he was arrested for homosexual acts in a YMCA in 1964. A major scandal erupted and Jenkins resigned. Johnson was unable to replace Jenkins, and instead divided his responsibilities among several staff members.

“A great deal of the president’s difficulties can be traced to the fact that Walter had to leave,” Johnson’s press secretary, George Reedy, once told an interviewer. “All of history might have been different if it hadn’t been for that episode.” Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark suggested that Jenkins’ resignation “deprived the president of the single most effective and trusted aide that he had. The results would be enormous when the president came into his hard times. Walter’s counsel on Vietnam might have been extremely helpful.”

Jenkins was born in Jolly, Texas, and spent his childhood in Wichita Falls, Texas. There he attended Hardin Junior College and then spent two years at the University of Texas, though he did not earn a degree. In 1945, following his discharge from the Army, he converted to Roman Catholicism and married Helen Marjorie Whitehill. Jenkins and his wife had 6 children, 4 boys and 2 girls. They separated in the early 1970s but never divorced. She died in 1987.

Jenkins resigned from the Air Force Reserve in February 1965. After leaving Washington, Jenkins returned to Texas and lived the rest of his life in Austin, where he worked as a Certified Public Accountant and management consultant and ran a construction company. He died in 1985, at the age of 67, a few months after suffering a stroke. A made-for-television film, Vanished, loosely based on the Jenkins resignation, aired in 1971.

Friedrich Alfred Krupp was heir to his father’s munitions empire. A master of the soft sell, he developed a close and lucrative relationship with the Kaiser. Krupp introduced diesel engines to Europe and began construction of the German U-Boat fleet.

Krupp was born in Essen, Germany. His father was Alfred Krupp. In 1887, Friedrich took over the leadership of his father's company. He married Margarethe Krupp (born Freiin von Ende). They had two daughters: Bertha and Barbara (married Tilo Freiherr von Wilmowsky).

After his father died, Krupp built an elaborate pleasure palace on the island of Capri, handed out gold bullet-shaped keys to local boys, and hired violinists to provide musical accompaniment for his extravagant parties.

On 15 November 1902 the Social Democratic magazine Vorwärts claimed in an article that Friedrich Alfred Krupp was homosexual, that he had a number of liaisons with local boys and men and that his fondest attachment was to Adolfo Schiano, an 18-year-old barber and amateur musician. Krupp sued for libel. But before the case went to trial, Krupp became convinced that he would be destroyed, like Oscar WILDE had been just a few years earlier, if he went through with it. A week later, on 22 November 1902, Krupp committed suicide. In a speech at his burial, Emperor Wilhelm II attacked the Social Democratic politicians, insisting that they had lied about Krupp's sexual orientation.

The plays and novellas of the bisexual Heinrich von Kleist explore societal ramifications of transgressive sexuality and frequently yoke illicit sex and death.

Kleist emerges from the hands of critics and biographers as a complex and dynamic figure, at once a romantic, realist, Rousseauist, Prussian nationalist, social critic, existentialist, and more recently, modernist.

During the almost ten years of his creative life, Kleist was enormously productive, writing seven plays, one uncompleted; eight novellas published in two volumes of Erzählungen (1810-1811); and essays on art and literature, as well as journalism and verse. His oeuvre is unfailingly paradoxical, ambiguous, and provocative, reflecting the conflicts between individual consciousness and society, struggles often indirectly expressed in his treatment of sexual themes.

Kleist's personal associations are marked by similar ambiguities: fervent though physically unconsummated attachments to several women and close, turbulent relationships with male companions.

Born in Frankfurt an der Oder, the oldest son of a Prussian army captain, Kleist survived the early death of both father (1788) and mother (1793). Entering the army at Potsdam at age fifteen, he attempted to follow the family tradition of a military career and participated in the campaign against the French Revolutionary armies in the Rhineland.

Cherry Jones (born November 21, 1956) is an American actress and recipient of the 2009 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Drama Series and the 1995 and 2005 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play. Most recently, she starred as Dr. Evans on NBC series Awake.

Jones was born in Paris, Tennessee, to a high school teacher mother and a flower shop owner father. She is a 1978 graduate of the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama. While at CMU, she was one of the earliest actors to work at City Theatre, a prominent fixture of Pittsburgh theatre.

In 1995, when Jones accepted her first Tony Award, for Best Leading Actress in 1995 for The Heiress, she thanked her then partner, architect Mary O'Connor. When she accepted her Best Actress Tony in 2005 for her work in Doubt, she thanked "Laura Wingfield", the Glass Menagerie character being played in the Broadway revival by Jones's girlfriend, actress Sarah Paulson. The pair had attended the awards together and kissed right after Jones won, thus making it clear that Paulson was not closeted about the relationship. In 2007, Paulson and Jones declared their love for each other in an interview with VelvetPark at Women's Event 10 for the LGBT Center of New York.

Paulson and Jones ended their relationship amicably in 2009.

Jones is well known to television fans as President Allison Taylor on the series 24 and for her work in films including Oceans Twelve and The Village.

Cherry Jones is an American actress and recipient of the 2009 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress – Drama Series and the 1995 and 2005 Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play. Jones is known as President Allison Taylor on the series 24 and for films like Oceans Twelve and The Village. In 1995, when Jones accepted her first Tony Award, for Best Leading Actress in 1995 for The Heiress, she thanked her then partner, architect Mary O'Connor.

When she accepted her Best Actress Tony in 2005 for her work in Doubt, she thanked "Laura Wingfield", the Glass Menagerie character being played in the Broadway revival by Jones's girlfriend, actress Sarah Paulson. The pair had attended the awards together and kissed right after Jones won. In 2007, Paulson and Jones declared their love for each other in an interview with VelvetPark at Women's Event 10 for the LGBT Center of New York. Paulson and Jones ended their relationship amicably in 2009.

Jodie Foster began her acting career at age three, appearing in several Disney TV productions. By the time she achieved worldwide fame, at age thirteen in Taxi Driver, she had already made eight features, including Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and One Little Indian. She won a Best Actress Oscar for The Accused in 1988 and another for Silence of the Lambs in 1991. She has also won multiple Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and SAG Awards.

For many years, Foster was determined to protect the privacy of her personal life, despite persistent rumors going back to her college days. As a condition for journalists who wanted to obtain an interview, Foster would reportedly insist that no questions be asked about her sexual orientation.

Foster was critical of her brother Buddy, not only for writing about his suspicion that Jodie was gay or bisexual, but also for revealing that their mother had a long-term domestic partnership with another woman. “I grew up with two gay parents,” he wrote in his autobiography Foster Child. “I had my Aunt Jo and my mother.”

Foster has two sons: Charles "Charlie" Foster (b. July 20, 1998) and Christopher "Kit" Foster (b. September 29, 2001). Speculation is that their father was producer Randy Stone, one of the founders of the Trevor Project, which offers counseling to gay and questioning youth. Stone died in February 2007.

Speculation about Jodie Foster ended in December 2007 when she publicly acknowledged her “longtime friend” and roommate for fourteen years, film producer Cydney Bernard, as “my beautiful Cydney, who sticks with me through the rotten and the bliss.” Foster has done nothing to discourage the press and public from recognizing this as her coming out.

Jodie Foster began her acting career at age three, appearing in several Disney TV productions. She won a Best Actress Oscar for The Accused in 1988 and another for Silence of the Lambs in 1991. She has also won multiple Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and SAG Awards. In her acceptance speech upon receiving the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2013 Golden Globe Awards, she thanked Bernard, calling her "my heroic co-parent, my ex-partner in love but righteous soul sister in life".

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and Cosmo cover girl Gia Marie Carangi caught the eyes of both men and women. Her life story details the tragedy of a beautiful woman battling internal demons. In Gia’s case, the demons won in the end.

Gia was the quintessential supermodel, appearing on the covers of Vogue, Vogue Paris, American Vogue, Vogue Paris, Italian Vogue, and several issues of Cosmopolitan in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

After Gia became addicted to drugs, her modeling career faltered, and in 1981 she dropped out of the fashion world. She then enrolled in a twenty-one-day detox program and started dating a college student called Rochelle (her real name was Elisa Golden), but her main girlfriend was makeup artist, Sandy Linter. Gia’s attempt to quit drugs was doomed when her good friend, fashion photographer Chris von Wangenheim, died in a car accident. Gia locked herself in a bathroom for hours, shooting heroin.

Afterward, Gia’s life entered a downward spiral of drugs and prostitution. She became infected with HIV and was among the first widely publicized cases of death from AIDS-RELATED complications.

Born RuPaul Andre Charles, cover girl RuPaul began her recording career in the mid-1980s and hit it big in 1993. “Supermodel” is the first number-one pop song recorded by a drag queen (if you don’t count BOY GEORGE). RuPaul has enjoyed a successful string of television and live appearances since then. Born in San Diego and raised in Atlanta, RuPaul always knew she was different from the rest. As she often notes, “We are all born naked, all the rest is drag.” She met her longtime boyfriend George at a bar, and was immediately attracted by his spirited dancing.

RuPaul Andre Charles (born November 17, 1960), best known as simply RuPaul, is an American actor, drag queen, model, author, and recording artist, who first became widely known in the 1990s when he appeared in a wide variety of television programs, films, and musical albums. Previously, he was a fixture on the Atlanta and New York City club scenes during the 1980s and early 90s. RuPaul has on occasion performed as a man in a number of roles, usually billed as RuPaul Charles. RuPaul is noted among famous drag queens for his indifference towards the gender-specific pronouns used to address him—both "he" and "she" have been deemed acceptable. "You can call me he. You can call me she. You can call me Regis and Kathie Lee; I don't care! Just as long as you call me." She hosted a short-running talk show on VH1, and currently hosts reality television shows RuPaul's Drag Race and RuPaul's Drag U. Rupaul is also known for his hit song "Supermodel (You Better Work)".

Clark Gable is known to have indulged in at least one drunken same-sex encounter: with wildman actor William HAINES.

Years later, in 1938, gay director George CUKOR—a close friend of Haines’—was working with Gable on Gone with the Wind. Another friend, Andy Lawler, was overheard at a party to exclaim, “Oh, George is directing one of Billy’s old tricks.” When word of the remark reached Gable, he stormed off the set and refused to return until Cukor was replaced. In Gable’s words, “I won’t be directed by a fairy! I have to work with a real man!” Victor Fleming was brought in to finish directing the Civil War epic.

Gable may have been particularly sensitive about his sexuality because his birth certificate mistakenly recorded him as a female. While he was growing up, his father often berated him and called him a sissy. When he was twenty-three Gable married forty-year-old acting coach Josephine Dillon, who told him, “I’ll at least make an actor of you, for you’ll never be a man.” Gable later claimed their marriage was never consummated. His third wife and the love of his life Carole Lombard once said disparagingly of his manhood: “If he was one inch shorter we’d be talking about the Queen of Hollywood.” (Picture: William Haines)

Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos in Pawtucket, Rhode Island on 14 November 1939) is an American composer and electronic musician.

Carlos first came to prominence in 1968 with Switched-On Bach, a recording of music by J.S. Bach painstakingly assembled, phrase-by-phrase, on the Moog synthesizer, at the time a relatively new and unknown instrument. The album earned three Grammy Awards in 1969. Other classical recordings followed. Carlos later began releasing original compositions, including the first-ever album of synthesized environmental sounds, Sonic Seasonings (1972) and an album exploring alternate tunings Beauty in the Beast (1986). She has also worked in film music, notably writing and performing scores for two Stanley Kubrick movies, A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980), as well as Walt Disney's Tron.

Carlos was born Walter Carlos in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. A musical prodigy, she started piano lessons at six, and at ten composed "A Trio for Clarinet, Accordion, and Piano." In 1953 (age 14) she won a Westinghouse Science Fair scholarship for a home built computer, well before "computer" was a household word. Carlos earned a B.A. in music and physics at Brown University (1962) and a master's degree in composition from Columbia University (1966). She studied with Vladimir Ussachevsky, a pioneer in electronic music, as well as Otto Luening and Jack Beeson, working in the famed Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.

Karen Silkwood was a worker at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant in Oklahoma during the 1970s. In testimony before the Atomic Energy Commission in the summer of 1974, she accused the company of numerous safety breaches. Soon afterward, she found that her home had been mysteriously contaminated with plutonium. She herself was dangerously contaminated, as was her girlfriend/roommate Sherry Ellis.

Silkwood believed that the company was trying to silence her by poisoning her with plutonium. She assembled a stack of documents corroborating her claims and was on her way to meet a newspaper reporter when she was killed in a mysterious automobile accident. No documents were found in the wreck.

The incident became the basis of the 1983 movie Silkwood, starring Meryl Streep. Cher portrayed Sherry Ellis and was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

Her family sued Kerr-McGee on behalf of her estate. In what was the longest trial up until then in Oklahoma history, the jury found Kerr-McGee liable for the plutonium contamination of Silkwood, and awarded substantial damages. These were reduced on appeal, but the case reached the United States Supreme Court in 1979, which upheld the damages verdict. Before another trial took place, Kerr-McGee settled with the estate out of court for US $1.38 million, while not admitting liability.

Terence Davies won the 1998 International Critics Award at Cannes for Distant Voices, Still Lives. The film went on to acclaim and popularity with audiences around the world. In 1992 he followed it with The Long Day Closes, which received similar accolades.

Davies’ third film, The Neon Bible, is set in the American South of the 1920s and ’30s. Gena Rowlands stars as an over-the-hill nightclub singer who returns to her small hometown, where she encourages her young, introverted nephew to come out of his shell. She also inspires him to rebel against strict religion and morality, with tragic results.

Davies has said the heroes in his films tend to be women because “being gay, I feel uncomfortable with men.”

Roland Emmerich is an A-list Hollywood director specializing in films that explore the sometimes rocky relationship between humans and aliens. In 1994 his Egyptian-flavored sci-fi/action flick Stargate was a surprise hit, spawning a long-running TV series.

When asked by a reporter about his fascination with extraterrestrials, Emmerich wondered aloud what it would be like to wake up one morning with fifteen-mile-wide spaceships hovering over major world cities. He turned to his producer Dean Devlin and said, “I think I have an idea for our next film.” This scenario played out in Independence Day, one of the most successful films of all time.

Emmerich followed up Independence Day with the maligned reboot of Godzilla, and then switched gears with Mel Gibson in The Patriot. More recent endeavors include the hits The Day After Tomorrow and 10,000 BC.

Openly gay, Emmerich has donated to the Legacy Project to preserve gay and lesbian films. He also rallied supporters of Hillary Clinton, hosting her at his Hollywood home in 2007 for a fundraiser during her run for the presidency.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is revered as the Father of Modern Turkey. He had also numerous young male lovers, throughout his lifetime. As biographer Patrick Balfour put it, “Women, for Mustafa, were a means of satisfying masculine appetites, little more; nor, in his zest for experience, would he be inhibited from passing adventures with young boys, if the opportunity offered and the mood, in this bisexual fin de siècle Ottoman age, came upon him.”

Atatürk became famous during World War I when he defeated the British who were attempting to land at Gallipoli. He opposed the Turkish government’s decision to surrender to the Allies and organized an army of resistance based at Ankara. They defeated the Allied occupation forces, deposed the sultan, and formed the Turkish republic. Atatürk became its first president.

Roy Simmons was an outstanding offensive lineman for the New York Giants, and he played for the Washington Redskins in the 1984 Super Bowl. In 1992, three years after he retired from professional football, Simmons publicly came out on The Phil Donahue Show.

In his autobiography, Out of Bounds (written with Damon DiMarco), he speaks of drug addiction, prostitution, and promiscuity.

In 1997 Simmons learned that he was HIV-positive. He became active in bringing public attention to the fight against AIDS, encouraging other sports figures to come out of the closet.

According to piano virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz, “There are three kinds of pianists: Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists, and bad pianists.” Horowitz himself fit under two of those categories. He achieved international fame during a career that spanned six decades. In 1933 he married Wanda Toscanini under pressure from her father, the famous conductor Arturo Toscanini. The marriage was unhappy, not least because Horowitz continued to have trysts with young men. Later in life Horowitz became more open, frequenting gay bars with his lover. Once, when invited to dinner at the home of gay director George CUKOR, Horowitz accepted, but said, “However, I would much rather come on Sunday.” (Sunday parties at Cukor’s were notorious gatherings of Hollywood’s most eligible gay young men.) Horowitz’ sexuality has been well documented in several books, including the Glann Plaskin and Harold Schonberg biographies.

Arthur Rubinstein said of Horowitz that "Everyone knew and accepted him as a homosexual." David Dubal wrote that in his years with Horowitz, there was no evidence that the octogenarian was sexually active, but that "there was no doubt he was powerfully attracted to the male body and was most likely often sexually frustrated throughout his life." Dubal observed that Horowitz sublimated a strong instinctual sexuality into a powerful erotic undercurrent which was communicated in his piano playing.

In the 1940s, Horowitz began seeing a psychiatrist. According to sources, this was an attempt to alter his sexual orientation. In the 1960s and again in the 1970s, the pianist underwent electroshock treatment for depression.

Although sexuality does not appear in any of the works of leftist political figure Manuel Azaña, he was committed to liberal freedom and revolutionary reforms.

Azaña was born in Alcalá de Henares, Spain, in 1880, and died in exile in 1940. He was one of the leading political figures on the left and held a number of government positions, including that of President of the Popular Front government that came to power in 1935. It was this government that was opposed by a coalition of army generals, Catholics, fascists, and monarchists who rebelled and plunged Spain into its bloody three-year Civil War. In 1939, Azaña crossed the border into France, never to return to Spain.

Azaña was a great lover of art, music, and literature, and a voracious reader. A number of his written works are political. His imprisonment in Barcelona by the right-wing government in 1934 became the material for his work Mi rebelión en Barcelona (My Rebellion in Barcelona, 1935). His book La velada en Benicarló (Vigil in Benicarló, 1939) is a dialogued novel in which an odd mix of people spend the night together commenting on the significance of the Spanish Civil War from their different perspectives.

Besides strictly political works, he published works of fiction: El jardín de los frailes (Garden of the Monks, 1927) and Fresdeval, an unfinished work that was published posthumously; a play, La corona (The Crown, 1933); and some literary criticism. He is also known as an accomplished translator. He and a close friend edited La pluma, a literary journal. His personal contributions to the journal have been gathered in the volume Plumas y palabras (Pens and Words, 1930).

k.d. lang was a hit as a country & western singer before she publicly came out as lesbian. Now she’s an even bigger star as a torch singer and has four Grammies under her belt buckle.

Kathryn Dawn Lang, OC (born November 2, 1961), known by her stage name k.d. lang, is a Canadian pop and country singer-songwriter and occasional actress.

Lang has won both Juno Awards and Grammy Awards for her musical performances; hits include "Constant Craving" and "Miss Chatelaine". She has contributed songs to movie soundtracks and has teamed with musicians such as Roy Orbison, Tony Bennett, Elton John, Anne Murray and Jane Siberry. Lang is also known for being a vegan as well as an animal rights, gay rights, and Tibetan human rights activist. She is a tantric practitioner of the old school of Tibetan Buddhism. She performed Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" live at the opening ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. Previously, she had performed at the closing ceremony of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. Lang possesses the vocal range of a mezzo-soprano.

Lang, who came out as a lesbian in a 1992 article of the LGBT news magazine The Advocate, has actively championed gay rights causes.

She has supported many causes over the years, including HIV/AIDS care and research. Her cover of Cole Porter's "So in Love" (from the Broadway musical, Kiss Me, Kate), appears on the Red Hot + Blue compilation album and video from 1990 (a tribute to Cole Porter to benefit AIDS research and relief). Her 2010 Greatest Hits album, Recollection, also includes this cover of "So in Love". Lang also recorded the song "Fado Hilario," singing in Portuguese, for the 1999 Red Hot AIDS benefit album "Onda Sonora: Red Hot + Lisbon," a traditional fado from Portugal.

Henry Willson played a leading role in popularizing the beefcake craze of the 1950s. In his book, Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall (2002), Richard Barrios writes, "Talent agent Henry Willson... had a singular knack for discovering and renaming young actors whose visual appeal transcended any lack of ability. Under his tutelage, Robert Mosely became Guy Madison, Orison Whipple Hungerford Jr. was renamed Ty Hardin, Arthur Gelien was changed to Tab Hunter, and Roy Fitzgerald turned into Rock Hudson. So successful was the beefcake aspect of this enterprise, and so widely recognized was Willson's sexuality, that it was often, and often inaccurately, assumed that all of his clients were gay."

One of Willson’s first clients was also his live-in lover, former child star Junior Durkin (Huckleberry Finn), who died tragically in a car crash at age nineteen. Willson’s other protégés included Guy Madison, Tab HUNTER, and Rock HUDSON. So many of Willson’s clients were gay that it was often assumed that any good looking young man represented by him was likely of that persuasion. Willson arranged the marriage between his secretary, Phyllis Gates, and Rock Hudson in 1955 to protect Hudson’s image. Willson also traded information about the sex lives of Rory Calhoun and Tab Hunter in exchange for an agreement that Confidential would not out Hudson. (Picture: Junior Durkin)

Henry Willson (July 31, 1911 – November 2, 1978) was an American Hollywood talent agent who played a large role in popularizing the beefcake craze of the 1950s. He was known for his stable of young, attractive clients, including Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Chad Everett, Robert Wagner, Nick Adams, Guy Madison, Troy Donahue, Rory Calhoun, Clint Walker, Doug McClure, Ty Hardin, and John Derek. He discovered Rhonda Fleming walking to Beverly Hills High School, brought her to David O. Selznick's attention, and helped groom her for stardom, and was instrumental in advancing Lana Turner's career.

David Brock (born November 2, 1962) first entered the public discourse as a staunch advocate for far-right conservatism. Following the 1991 Senate hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the US Supreme Court, Brock wrote a sharply critical article about Thomas’ accuser Anita Hill famously referring to her as “a bit nutty and a bit slutty.” In the January 1994 issue of The American Spectator, Brock wrote about Bill Clinton’s time as governor of Arkansas, spurring the “Troopergate” scandal. The case became entangled in Kenneth Starr’s investigation of the Whitewater scandal that eventually led to the president’s impeachment.

Three years later, Brock surprised his conservative base by publishing a sympathetic biography of Hillary Clinton. In July 1997 Brock published a confessional piece in Esquire magazine titled “I Was a Conservative Hit Man,” in which he recanted much of what he had said about Anita Hill and Bill Clinton, as well as criticizing his own reporting methods.

In Blinded by the Right, Brock claimed that he had reached a turning point—he had thoroughly examined charges against the Clintons, could not find any evidence of wrongdoing, and did not want to make any more misleading claims. Brock claimed that his former friends in right-wing politics shunned him because he didn’t attack the Clintons with sufficient savagery. He also argued that his “friends” had not really been friends at all, abandoning him when he came out of the closet.

His 2004 book The Republican Noise Machines details a conspiracy to raise the profile of conservative opinions in the press through false accusations of liberal media bias, dishonest and highly partisan columnists, partisan news organizations and academic studies, and other methods.

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